Apple iCloud to use microsoft software

[lazydays]

http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/09/04...soft-Azure

I thought apple was big into solaris but apparently they are changing their ways.

[TheTominator]

I read the article linked to in that /. submission. While some of the unconfirmed rumors seemed plausible, the article stated "Customers' data is being striped between the pair." and "By selecting two suppliers, both very different in their services and their level of maturity, Apple is reducing its risk of becoming hostage to a single supplier."

Unless they are using a different definition than most for "striping", this would be a very foolish thing to do. In RAID configurations, striping is dividing up the data between multiple disks to sacrifice reliability to improve performance. That is the opposite of what the article states Apple is trying to achieve by going with two vendors simultaneously. Apple would increase its risk by becoming hostage to both suppliers simultaneously.

If they were "mirroring" it would make sense. If one vendor doesn't have good performance, the other is there for a live redundancy so that users won't have the unreliability Apple had experienced when trying to do it all themselves.

The only reason I can think of that Apple would go the foolish route of using both third-party cloud services in this way would be if there really is a performance bottleneck and both services independently have 4x the reliability needed for Apple's cloud service. Apple would just be using them as a stopgap measure until their new datacenter comes fully online and Apple can drop those third-party services.

[The UnDoug]

That reads like an Onion article.

Is it really true???

[Trouble]

Old news. http://www.infiniteapple.net/apple-iclou...confirmed/ There were a ton of articles back in the middle of June about this. No reason to rebuild every wheel at every level at first launch. But don't think for a second that Apple isn't doing that right now.

[JoeH]

lazydays wrote:
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/09/04...soft-Azure

I thought apple was big into solaris but apparently they are changing their ways.

What is Apple's relation with Oracle? Since Oracle now owns Sun and the Solaris OS, that may have influenced their choices.